King for a Day – the Rest of the Year, Not So Much

Since 1986, Americans have observed the third Monday of January as a federal
holiday: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Schools and communities put on marches
and commemorative events. Some workers (sadly not including most of the working
poor of all races to whose advancement King dedicated his life) get the day
off.

It’s an election year, so we can expect bombardment by politicians’
pledges of allegiance to this or that subset of Dr. King’s values.

Republicans will piously assure us that they hew to King’s dream of “a
day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content
of their character.” Then they’ll get back to finding new ways to
keep African-Americans from voting.

Democrats will highlight their support for voting rights and likely also name-check
Dr. King’s final effort, the “Poor People’s Campaign,” even
as they inveigh against the gun rights that made the civil rights movement possible
and against the emerging sharing economy that’s freeing and empowering
America’s working poor without any help from government.

Neither party’s prominent presidential candidates will likely address
themselves to Dr. King’s thoughts on war and peace. The Democrats have
already driven their only peace candidate, Lincoln Chafee, from the race, and
on the GOP side Rand Paul’s mildly noninterventionist campaign is on life
support.

King opposed the great American war of his public life, the war in Vietnam,
rightly referring to the US government as “the greatest purveyor of violence
in the world today.”

What would he think of a Democratic Party whose standard-bearers (not to mention
the first African-American president!) never met a war they didn’t like,
or of a Republican Party whose front-runners are so intent on fomenting war
with Iran that they’d rather leave American prisoners in Iranian hands
than bring them home, and posture over the Iranian release of American naval
personnel caught out in a covert operation in Iranian waters as if that constituted
Iran provoking the US rather than the other way around?

I was less than two years old at the time of Dr. King’s assassination.
He’s never been anything but a larger-than-life historical figure to me.
Nonetheless it offends me that nearly 50 years after his death he’s become
a mere plaster saint, periodically and faux-prayerfully invoked by competing
political factions who want to traffic on his popularity without bothering to
live his values. It should offend you too.